O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,103

flight

Beneath the cover of the night

“It’s . . .” Sweeney stared at it, confused.

“What?” He had heard the strangeness in her voice.

“Nothing, it’s just that it’s very odd.”

They walked around, looking at some of the other stones. “Is it weird for you to think that you’re related to them?” she asked him.

“I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“Will you tell Sherry Kimball? You’ll have to.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll have to tell Patch and Britta as well.”

“I think Patch may have suspected that there was something wrong anyway,” Sweeney said. “I’ve had the feeling, ever since I got here, that he didn’t want me to look into this thing. Do you suppose he suspected that his grandfather had had something to do with Mary’s death, the way I did?”

“It’s possible. He may also have been nervous about you looking into old family history because of this thing with the land and the condominiums and all.”

She looked up at him.

“Sweeney?”

“Yes?”

“What’s wrong? You’ve an odd expression on your face.”

“I’d forgotten about the thing with the land. That’s all.”

“You look as though you’d seen a ghost.”

She walked around in a little circle, something that helped her to think. “It’s just that I had been assuming that Ruth Kimball and Sabina were murdered because they knew something about Mary’s death. But we now know they weren’t killed because of Mary. So I have to ask myself why they were killed. And it just occurred to me that I’d forgotten about the whole thing with the land.”

“And . . .?” He was looking at her with a concerned expression on his face.

“And, it’s in the missing diary pages. Remember? Myra Benton asked Morgan about the land and he said that Gilmartin was going to buy it from Louis Denholm.”

Sweeney paused. “What did Patch tell you about it?”

Ian hesitated for a moment. “What he told you, I think. That he had always thought he owned the piece of land, but when they went and looked, no deed had ever been recorded and it looked like it was actually still owned by Ruth Kimball. So he decided to fight this condo thing from the angle of its intrinsic historical value. State regulations against development and all that. You were there, weren’t you? Sweeney?”

But she had gone back to Louis Denholm’s gravestone and now she was standing in front of it and reading the words over and over again to herself. “Come here,” she said. “Take a look at this.”

She pointed to the words on the stone. “The language is wrong. ‘Hath?’ ‘Taketh?’ That’s eighteenth century, not nineteenth. It’s like he was drawing attention to it. And ‘Death’s dark deed.’ Now, I have never in my entire life heard of the physical experience of death described as Death’s dark deed. It’s wrong. It doesn’t make sense.”

Sweeney took off her right glove and traced four letters with her bare finger. The stone was smooth and cold.

“I’m saying that it’s a puzzle. The word deed is in there for a reason. Maybe Mary was more her father’s daughter than we thought. Maybe he’s trying to tell us where that deed is.”

IAN LOOKED SKEPTICAL. “But why would he want people to know where the deed is? Or, what I mean is, why would he hide the deed in the first place?”

Sweeney said honestly, “I don’t know. Patch said that his father told him that his grandfather bought the piece of land off Louis Denholm. But when they went to look, the deed was never recorded. Now, according to Patch, if they could find the deed, they could stop the development. So it’s important.”

“But Louis Denholm wouldn’t have known that.”

“I know, but I feel like it’s important.”

“Sweeney . . .”

“Look, just humor me, okay? I once wrote about a gravestone where the name of the man’s wife was spelled out by the first letter of each line of the epitaph,” Sweeney said. “ ‘Bertha.’ And the epitaph was framed as a question, asking if anyone knew the name of the ‘fiend’—that was the word it used—who was responsible for his death by poisoning. And if you put it together, it says ‘Bertha.’ So what do the first letters spell, if you put them together?” She took a pencil from her jacket pocket and wrote them down on a scrap of paper as she read out loud. “ ‘T-H-H-B’ I don’t think that’s it.”

“All right,” Ian said, resigned. “If it is a hidden message, I think you’ve got